1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to systems for planning and more particularly to a system that includes a relational database that produces bill-of-materials from planning information.
2. Description of the Related Art
High tech products require the development of complicated bill-of-material (BOM) structures to support manufacturing stocking and build options. High tech industries typically use a product manager tool in a manual process to create and release BOMs and put some pieces of information in multiple parts of the BOM structures. This manual process is very error prone and provides many situations where the information is not updated in all locations, which may cause products to be built incorrectly. Further, the current process is very labor intensive and product sometimes need to wait until the BOM structures are reviewed before manufacturing begins. Separate software tools are often used to perform part of ordering, such as mask ordering.
In the semiconductor industry mask ordering and the preparation of the graphical data used to make masks are separate and usually manual or semi-automated activities. Newer technologies require much more extensive graphical data preparation. If the data preparation and mask build are not completely integrated, defective products will be produced. Currently, in the semiconductor industry, large amounts of resource are invested in checking and rechecking data prep and mask orders to ensure they match.
In addition, businesses typically run financial plans in different systems than those used to support tactical execution in systems, such as the systems used to create BOMs. For high technology parts, this results in differences in execution that could be related to changes in product description, changes in volume demand, or changes in manufacturing. When implementing complex high part number products, it is almost impossible to separate out the cause of the problem. Accountability of the business management team is difficult to establish because the productivity of the teams cannot easily be measured. Therefore, there is a need for a system that can automatically identify the bill-of-materials from a customer's description (e.g., from the customer's perspective).